Write a JSON Schema case study for the W3C Web of Things

pages/posts/w3c-wot-case-study.md

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+---
+title: "How the W3C Web of Things brings JSON Schema to the Internet of Things"
+date: 2022-08-17T06:00:00+00:00
+type: Case Study
+cover: /img/posts/2022/w3c-wot-case-study/cover.webp
+authors:
+  - name: Juan Cruz Viotti
+    photo: /img/avatars/jviotti.webp
+    link: https://twitter.com/jviottidc
+excerpt: "Using JSON Schema at the W3C Web of Things to create an interoperability layer so that different IoT platforms, protocols and standards can operate together"
+language: en
+---
+
+## Challenge
+
+The Internet of Things (IoT) is the network of physical "smart" objects that
+exchange data with other devices over the Internet. While communication and
+interoperability are by definition the crux of the Internet of Things, the
+emergence of custom or proprietary solutions results in devices that cannot
+talk to each other due to differences in data interchange mechanisms.
+
+To integrate these disparate devices, developers must work with a growing set
+of protocols, serialization formats and API specifications. This results in
+repetitive, non-scalable and error-prone work that is difficult to automate.
+
+While technologies like OpenAPI and AsyncAPI largely solve this problem in the
+context of Web APIs, they fall short for describing networks of non-HTTP and
+multi-protocol devices, and do not consider different modes of interaction
+based on their meaning in the physical world.
+
+## Solution
+
+To solve these problems, the W3C Web of Things works on providing standardized
+building blocks that make use of JSON Schema.
+
+JSON Schema is used for validating descriptions of network-facing capabilities
+of physical entities called [Thing Descriptions][thing-description], and to
+model and describe data sent by Internet of Things consumers and producers in a
+multi-protocol manner.
+
+The W3C Web of Things specifications are on board with JSON Schema since Draft
+4, and even the first draft versions already catered to data models of Internet
+of Things devices.  "Currently, we are on JSON Schema Draft 7 and expect to
+move to JSON Schema
+[2020-12](https://json-schema.org/specification-links.html#understanding-draft-names-and-numbers)
+or a newer one when starting our new charter in February 2023," said Ege
+Korkan, Research Scientist at Siemens and W3C Specifications editor.
+
+"We observe JSON Schema becoming more and more stable over the years and
+Postman's support to the community gives us even more confidence on it,"
+continued Ege Korkan.
+
+JSON Schema is delivering exciting features, and more importantly these
+features are becoming more and more consistent across implementations.  For
+example, Ege Korkan added, "JSON Schema vocabularies are very promising and we
+plan to explore them further in conjunction with Semantic Web technologies."
+
+## Impact
+
+The W3C Web of Things relies on JSON-LD for linking vocabularies and ontologies
+that already exist on the web, such as [SAREF][saref], [Units of
+Measure][units-of-measure] and [Schema.org][schema-org]. Being based on the
+JSON data model, JSON Schema fits well with JSON-LD when integrating both
+technologies as part of a single specification.
+
+Adopting JSON Schema means that the W3C Web of Things does not need to invest
+effort on inventing another schema language. As a consequence of the popularity
+of JSON Schema, existing tooling can be often reused instead of implementing
+custom parsers, validators, code generators and UI generators for all the
+programming languages that the community might be interested in.
+
+JSON Schema has proven to be a foundational block for creating higher-level
+tooling that is specific to the W3C Web of Things. As a notable example, the
+community has developed a tool called
+[testbench](https://github.com/tum-esi/testbench) that makes use of JSON Schema
+definitions inside Thing Descriptions to generate matching payloads for the
+purpose of stress and penetration testing.
+
+Given the growing popularity of using JSON Schema to generate web-based forms,
+W3C Web of Things specifications can be used to automatically generate
+dashboards and user interfaces to interact with the objects modeled by Thing
+Descriptions.
+
+## Key Impact Results
+
+The ultimate metric of success for a standard like the W3C Web of Things is
+adoption, and community adoption is not something you can just "engineer".  Ege
+Korkan commented, "since we adopt JSON Schema, developers who are familiar
+with it have a smaller learning curve when learning the W3C Web of Things
+standard."
+
+"During my PhD times, my MSc engineering students had to become familiar with
+the W3C Web of Things. These students typically took 1 week to go through my
+[tutorial](https://github.com/tum-esi/wot-tutorial). If they knew JSON Schema,
+that 1 week would become 2 days", said Ege Korkan.
+
+## W3C Web of Things
+
+The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the standardization organization behind
+most of the standards used in the Web. The W3C Web of Things Working and
+Interest Groups work on the standardization of Web of Things at W3C.
+
+The Web of Things groups aim to create an interoperability layer so that
+different Internet of Things platforms, protocols and standards can operate
+together.
+
+The work started as a discussion in the Web of Things Community Group in
+2013-2014.  It proceeded to become an Interest Group in 2015 that
+collected the use cases and defined the standards to be worked on. Since 2016,
+the working group is working on different standards on the Web of Things with
+the first publications of the Thing Description and Architecture
+recommendations in 2019 and more that will be published by the end of this
+year.
+
+At the time of this writing, the Working Group consists of 96 participants
+representing 36 organizations and the Interest Group consists of 131
+participants representing 48 organizations. 
+
+![W3C Web of Things Examples](/blog/img/posts/2022/w3c-wot-case-study/wot-examples.webp)
+
+## Getting Started
+
+The W3C Web of Things Working Group invites you to leverage your existing JSON
+Schema knowledge to play with the Internet of Things through the use of the W3C
+Web of Things specifications and tools. You might already have a smart device
+next to you, just that it does not come with a Thing Description!
+
+If you write your own Thing Description, you can programatically interact with
+your device by using the [Node.js Web of Things
+implementation](https://github.com/eclipse/thingweb.node-wot), or play with it
+through the
+[Node-RED](https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-red-contrib-web-of-things)
+integration.
+
+To learn more, head over to the
+[documentation](https://www.w3.org/WoT/documentation/), watch the [introductory
+videos](https://www.w3.org/WoT/videos/), have a look at the many examples
+provided as part of the [Thing Description specification](thing-description)
+and try them out on the [Thing Description
+Playground](http://plugfest.thingweb.io/playground/) app.
+
+Thank you to Ege Korkan, Web of Things Researcher at Siemens AG, Munich, the
+W3C Web of Things Working and Interest Groups and Coralie Mercier from the W3C
+Marketing and Communications Team for allowing and enabling us to share this
+case study with you.
+
+Cover image: [Hello WoT](https://bind.systems/tags/web-of-things/) © 2022 by desertmonitor OÜ is licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0
+
+[thing-description]: https://www.w3.org/TR/2020/REC-wot-thing-description-20200409/
+[saref]: https://saref.etsi.org
+[units-of-measure]: https://bioportal.bioontology.org/ontologies/UO
+[schema-org]: https://schema.org